Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley

Author:Paul McAuley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2011-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

19

I went with Tim Coveney to his friend’s flat for the laptop, then caught the Tube to Holborn, walked over to St Martin’s main building at Southampton Row, and had one of the porters retrieve the envelope Tim had sent to himself. My Mini was where I had left it, in the bus lane by the roadblock. A traffic ticket was stuck under its windscreen wipers. The peace wardens affected nonchalance as they watched me rip up the ticket and drive away.

An hour later, at T12, I switched on my computer and inserted Sophie Booth’s data spike.

The computer’s screen blanked; for a moment I thought a virus had booted itself up, but then a full-screen picture of Sophie Booth slid down. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed in the room where she had been murdered, looking up at the webcam in the corner of the ceiling, dressed in jeans and an oversized white shirt, the sleeves rolled up on her pale arms. Swags of stars twinkled across the ceiling. Candles burned in the fireplace.

She smiled and said, “I’m sorry, Tim. I know you’ll have been frantic, wondering where I’ve gone. That’s why you’re looking at what you thought was my backup spike, isn’t it? I can’t tell you where I’ve gone—I can’t tell you anything. That’s harsh I know, but that’s how it has to be. It’ll all come out soon enough, and then you’ll know how I did all those tricks. Remember what I said, about fortune favouring the brave? Well, I deserve this, Tim. I saw my chance, and went for it. And now I’m gone.”

I stared at my grainy reflection in the suddenly blank screen. The drive clicked and whirred and wouldn’t give up the spike. I managed to reboot the computer, but there was nothing at all on the spike now.

How was I supposed to know that the file Sophie Booth had left behind would eat itself?

I put the spike back in its sheath and went upstairs, where I discovered that Charlie Wills had finished with Sophie Booth’s laptop.

“Someone did a good job on it,” he told me. “It was reformatted about a month ago, a very clean job by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Every sector was overwritten with zeros before the operating system and programs were reinstalled.”

“What about the web browser cache?”

“It had been set to purge itself every day, but no problem. I managed to retrieve most of the files that accumulated after the reformat.” Charlie Wills swung to and fro in his chair. His long hair was loose today, flowing down the back of his clean white lab coat. He handed me a spike and said, “I found some dirty movies, just as you expected.”

I asked him to take a look at Sophie Booth’s spike, and went back to my computer and checked the compilation he had made. The beginning of the murder sequence, cut off before the killer settled down to his work, confirming Tim Coveney’s story. A dozen clips of Sophie’s solo home-made porn.

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